Up on Eurogamer. A rare thing amongst expansion packs – one where the original game on its own is worse without it.
Heh
A brief moment in the sun, writing about the Sims for the Independent half a decade ago. Hadn’t realised it was online, so it’s nice to have a permanent record. I cringe a little, sometimes a lot, at what was written there by the significantly dumber brain I possessed back in 2002, but hey – I’m in a real-life newspaper, ma.
Review: UFO – Extraterrestrials
I have no idea what or who dictates whether reviews I’ve written for PC Gamer appear on CVG or Games Radar. My gibber about this X-COM remake is on the latter, which means I’m in the same August company as whichever human failure wrote Radar’s Asses of E3 horror-post. This last is so awful that I’m not even going to link to it.
Incidentally, the review has had its entire original introduction sliced off to match the Radar house style, and the score has been slightly inflated. Oh, for better ownership rights.
Review: Lost Planet
Could and perhaps should have scored it much lower, but I’m now so used to videogame plot and characterisation being rock-bottom hideous that the fact they were so in this didn’t bother me as much as it did other reviewers. As I say in the conclusion, that 70% is good for right now, but come August and Bioshock, you can casually shave 10-15% right off it.
Kinda review: World of mods – Half-Life 2
Five of the best-ish on Eurogamer. Pleasingly, the creator of one of the mods turns up in the comments thread to say he’s taking my criticism on-board. It’s moments like those that make me feel I’m not just a useless, filthy hack.
Also
The current issue of SFX (number 159, I believe) includes a reasonably large feature I penned on the history of Transformers. Its existence pleases me because a) it’s not about games or computers and b) it went some way towards paying off my ridiculous plastic robot habit
Review: Spider-Man 3
After the raging misogyny of the introduction, I fear this then turns into one of my more functional reviews. One of those situations where I was trying to dredge up enthusiasm I didn’t have for a messy, brainless game I knew a fair few people would nevertheless enjoy. Nowhere near as horrid as the recent Transformers game, but it’s a terrible shame Activision seems entirely complacent about all the big licenses it has these days.
